


Of Snow and Stars

by hushlittlewolf



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-19
Updated: 2013-09-19
Packaged: 2017-12-27 00:12:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/971958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hushlittlewolf/pseuds/hushlittlewolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can’t help but stare at the center of the Alpha Packs’ mark, at the exact place where he had drawn the Northstar, and think about how he’s so off course now, lost with no heading, no home, and no Laura to lull him to sleep with stories and stars and sisterly love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Snow and Stars

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea where this came from. My friend and I were hashing out Teen Wolf headcannons one day and this one was saved in my phone and I just wrote the thing. 
> 
> (I have a shit ton of Derek Hale feels. It's a fucking problem.)

When the ash has settled and the flames have been put out, when the funerals have been held and condolences given, when it suddenly becomes all so **real** — _they are all dead—_ Derek and Laura pack up what little they have left and put Beacon Hills behind them. They drive aimlessly for a few weeks, up and down the Western Coast, but smoke clings to their clothes, burns at the back of their throats, and they cannot drive far enough.

In L.A. they hop on the first plane out and a few hours later, find themselves staring at the Statue of Liberty as they descend from the clouds. It’s cold in New York, winter just setting in, snow already dusting the ground.

Laura buys Derek a worn leather jacket from a second hand store and leaves it on his motel bed one morning before she goes out to hunt for apartments. Derek doesn’t deserve the gift, not after all he’s done, but he’s selfish and shrugs the jacket on anyway, tries not to think of the blood on his hands and how he can never wash it off.

They move into a small, shitty apartment in a questionable neighborhood. In all honesty, a place in Manhattan would not have been all too implausible for them—even at 18 and 23—but they cannot bring themselves to touch the mounds of inheritance and insurance money sitting in their accounts. It’s blood money, tainted and scorched, and Derek feels sick every time he thinks about it. Laura is the one that gets a string of part time jobs to keep them going—waiting tables and bar tending—but Derek…Derek can barely bring himself to leave the four, water stained walls of their ‘home.’

Because Derek _hates_ the city, loathes it with the entirety of him. He doesn’t know how much of that is **him** and how much is the wolf in his veins, shackled now in this foreign, urban place, but either way, there are too many smells and sounds and people, all threatening to consume him. It is all concrete and steel, no greenery, no endless woods. There are the parks—Central, Prospect, Riverside—but those are manmade things with boundaries, and Derek was used to nature unrestrained, untamed, wild and ugly and free.

It doesn’t seem to bother Laura. Or if it does, she keeps it to herself. She’s always smiling, ruffling Derek’s hair, tossing a snowball at his head as they walk to the corner store. Derek knows she’s trying. She’s trying to forget that they are both orphans, she’s trying to forget the smell of smoke; she’s trying to pull her baby brother out of this dark place he’s forced himself into; she’s trying to save the only family she has left, even if it’s from himself.

But Derek doesn’t want to be saved. He doesn’t deserve it. So, he scowls at her laughter, jerks away from her soft touches, and stalks through the snow without a backwards glance, ice sliding down the back of his neck. Laura still tries though, but Derek is too full of hatred—for himself and this godforsaken place—and guilt. He disappears for hours at a time, walks laps around the city he loathes, but for all his hatred, all his misplaced anger, he sometimes feels—if just for a moment—a small sense of relief. Relief for the constant rush of millions of lives, battering him along, dragging him away.

At night, beneath the lights of the Time Square instead of the moon, with the slap of his shoes on concrete instead of the crunch of leaves, Derek loses himself to the insanity of New York City, the crush of it’s inhabitants, and tries to escape his thoughts and never-ending guilt if only for a little while.

It doesn’t always work though.

Sometimes, the pain is too much.

~*~*~*~*

One night, he comes back to the apartment in the cold hours right before dawn. There is ice in his hair, and he can’t feel his toes anymore. The taste of vomit clings to the back of his throat from where he puked on the curb earlier in the evening, watching a little girl and her family walking home, hearing the child crow about a lost tooth. It had been a fleeting thought, but Derek had suddenly remembered that Cora had never lost her last tooth, a stubborn thing in the back of her mouth. She used to complain all the time about it, pray for the day it would finally come out, except…now it never would. Derek heaved until he tasted blood and told himself the wetness on his cheeks was from melting snowflakes. 

He opens to the door to their crappy ‘home’ and braces himself for Laura’s concerned and angry lecture. It doesn’t come, however, and it doesn’t come…because she’s not there. The apartment is dark and silent—as silent as anything can be in the city—and Derek feels terror like he hasn’t in months. Because Laura doesn’t work tonight and it’s almost dawn and she should be in bed but Derek can’t hear her breathing, can’t find her heartbeat, and what if she’s gone _deadgone_ and he’s all **_alone_**?!

It’s just as he’s about to tear out of the building and tear apart the city to find her when he catches Laura’s sent. It’s easy and sweet, not tainted by the stench of pain or distress, so Derek takes deep lungfuls of air as he follows the scent up to the roof, tries to calm his racing heart from crawling out of his mouth.

He finds Laura sitting in the snow spread out with her hair a dark halo around her head. She lies in the impression of a snow angel, and when Derek comes to stand over her, she smiles. It’s soft and sad and she looks so much like Talia—like their beautiful, powerful, _dead_ mother—that Derek falls to his knees besides her head and can’t move from under the guilt settling along the bowed line of his shoulders. Laura reaches up and runs her fingers through Derek’s hair, but her eyes are on the night sky above his head.

“I wish, for one night, we could see the stars and the moon here,” she whispers. “It would be nice to feel Mother Luna again.”

Mother Luna. That’s what their dad had called the moon when he read them to sleep as children. Derek feels his throat close, his lungs constrict. His chest feels heavy, weighed down by all the things he’s never said, never confessed— _Kate and what he thought was love and a match he might as well have struck himself—_ because Laura would **_hate him_** and he couldn’t take that. He couldn’t lose her too. So, he remains silent and hates himself all the more.

Laura senses the turmoil in him—she always does and always will because she’s his alpha now and all they have left is each other—and pulls him down beside her in the snow. She squirms around until they are sitting side-by-side, and then she starts drawing. Derek watches as her fingers glide through the slush beneath them, carving out shapes and forms and stars.

“Ursa Major,” she tells him. She’s drawn the Big Dipper at their feet. “And Ursa Minor.” The smaller constellation soon joins its companion. “This one’s Orion’s Belt, and here’s the Draco Constellation, and the Dog Star, Sirius.”

She looks up at him and howls quietly—not the howl of their kind, but the reedy screech of a dog—and Derek almost smiles. Laura grins, eyes dancing, and she continues to sketch the universe around them, labeling them properly, telling Derek the origins and the stories of each one even though he’s too old for stories now, too jaded. The moon is just the moon, not Mother Luna watching over him. He knows how the world works; it’s no longer a mystery. But he listens all the same to the tales of Hercules and Andromeda and loses himself in the cadence of Laura’s voice, the warmth of her pressed against his shoulder.

When the sun begins to break over the horizon, Laura reaches out and wipes away Ursa Minor. Derek frowns at her, confused, because she leaves the rest as they are. “Why did you do that?” he asks.

Laura smiles and pulls away a little, wiggles until there’s a hand between their hips, and her finger digs into the snow. A moment later, Ursa Minor is restored, and Laura is carving a large circle at the end of the Little Dipper’s handle.

“Polaris,” she says when she’s done. “The Northstar.” It’s sitting directly between them. “It’s the star that, if you can find, will always get you back on course. It’s the star that will take you home.”

Derek shudders out a misty breath, digs claws into his thighs, and stares down at the Northstar between them. “We don’t have a home,” he mutters, and it takes like bile in the back of his throat, takes like ash and sin and _guilt._ Laura laughs, softly, and Derek snaps his head up to stare at her in shock because _how could that be funny?_

“Course we do baby bro,” she tells him. She tilts her head, snow clinging to her eyelashes, and reaches out to ruffle his hair. “We just lost sight of it for a while. It’s still there though.”

_I’m still here,_ she doesn’t say, but Derek hears it all the same. He swallows the glass in his throat and leans into her hand and tells himself the wetness on his cheeks is from melting snowflakes.

 ~*~*~*~

Years later, Derek will stand in his loft in Beacon Hills and draw the same patterns Laura did in the dust of his windows. He will label them meticulously and whisper their stories to himself as the light of Mother Luna drifts softly through the glass.

And when the Alpha Pack declares war, when they come and splash their symbol across his windows—and he has more important things to worry about, _he knows this—_ Derek can’t help but notice how his drawings have been smudged, blurred, the carefully drawn map thrown into disarray, just like his life.

He can’t help but stare at the center of the Alpha Packs’ mark, at the exact place where he had drawn the Northstar, and think about how he’s so off course now, lost with no heading, no home, and no Laura to lull him to sleep with stories and stars and sisterly love.

“I’m still here,”Derek says to himself, eyes closed and the taste of snow on his tongue.

There’s no one there to answer him.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi :D Here's my tumblr: http://the-wild-wolves-around-you.tumblr.com/


End file.
